Fòram na Gàidhlig

I was thinking, Gàidhlig would be SO much easier for people to learn if someone made a Michel Thomas style course for it - basically breaking the language down into it's component parts and explaining all the verb tenses and common everyday language in a simple to follow way in an audio course. I am a fan of Michel Thomas Method courses because they are very effective and really do work, so I don't understand why nobody has thought of doing something similar for Gàidhlig.

An opening for you for when you're fluent It's just not a big market, so commercial companies rarely dip their toes in making materials for Gaelic.

akerbeltz wrote: An opening for you for when you're fluent

Absolutely I'd love to do something like that once I get fluent. I'd better get working hard then...

Part of the problem is that when you look at the courses made under the MT brand, you find that something's missing, meaning no-one fully understands what Thomas was really doing.

While there are certain principles to what he did, a lot of it was done by feel. The courses he recorded himself were off-the-cuff lessons based on a mixture of habit (from delivering courses regularly) and adapting to the students in the room. Before attempting to record a real MT course, you'll probably need to spend a lot of time teaching in the style to develop a feel for what works and what doesn't.

Níall Beag wrote: Part of the problem is that when you look at the courses made under the MT brand, you find that something's missing, meaning no-one fully understands what Thomas was really doing.

While there are certain principles to what he did, a lot of it was done by feel. The courses he recorded himself were off-the-cuff lessons based on a mixture of habit (from delivering courses regularly) and adapting to the students in the room. Before attempting to record a real MT course, you'll probably need to spend a lot of time teaching in the style to develop a feel for what works and what doesn't.

So do you think a Michel Thomas style course could work for Gaelic, given that's it's a very different language to the others that Thomas himself taught? I was thinking of taking the structures and sentences he taught in his Spanish or French courses, for example, and tr*nsl*t*ng them into Gaelic, thereby creating a Gaelic version of the course.

I know that Gaelic is a totally different structure to European languages etc, but that could be a good starting point, eg sentences like 'I want to eat something', 'I want to eat now because I am hungry', 'I have to sleep because I am tired', 'I am busy today', 'Do you have it for me now because I need it' etc - basically just breaking the language down into its building blocks/component parts and then using those parts to create useful everyday sentences and express thoughts.

I reckon there could be a good market for an 'idiot proof' course like this teaching Gaelic, as a lot of potential Gaelic learners are put off by books that explain everything in a really complex, hard to understand way.

I don't think there's much value in following the ordering, because you'd be switching between markedly different structures and you'd confuse people with that.

However, one element that is core to MT's philosophy which is slowly being reflected more in mainstream teaching is the idea of teaching "I have it" and "I have one" early on, instead of teaching people to say "I have three cats, two lunchboxes and a shirt" but not be able to say "I have it".

Teaching in smaller languages normally lags behind trends, and there's more resistance to this in Gaelic teaching because the system is significantly more complex in Gaelic than other Western European languages, what with the use of various prepositional pronouns instead of just plain pronouns. It's a false argument, though, as that's no more complex than a case system -- the issue is just that most Gaelic teachers and learners don't have a broad frame of reference of foreign languages, with many only having high school French.